


Harpooners vs. Zombies

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Baseball, F/M, M/M, Yuletide 2012, Yuletide Treat, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Were you expecting something else?” Pella asked. “Some kind of sex-induced apocalypse?”</p><p>Henry scratched the back of his head. “Er,” he said. “Well…”</p><p>Spoilers for most of the book. And also zombies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harpooners vs. Zombies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kristin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristin/gifts).



> The first line is straight from the original novel. I have to take responsibility for everything else. (I'm pretty sure some plot points actually make _more_ sense with zombies, though.)

“Were you expecting something else?” Pella asked. “Some kind of sex-induced apocalypse?”

Henry scratched the back of his head. “Er,” he said. “Well…”

Outside, there was a bloodcurdling scream followed by a strange sort of squelching sound. At 2am, with students stumbling back from Bartleby's in various states of inebriation, this would have been nothing to remark upon, and Henry usually slept right through it all. Around dinner time, though, it was a little unusual.

Pella had gone over the window to look, pulling on her sweatshirt. "Is there some sort of drama club on campus?"

"Sure," Henry said. "Owen's there every Wednesday and Saturday if we don't have a game. They've produced some of his plays.” He felt he should say something intelligent about Owen’s plays, which were possibly something that would interest her, but apparently Owen was somehow sleeping with her father, and that made him wish he hadn’t mentioned Owen at all.

“What a guy,” Pella said softly. “Must be some sort of flash mob. Do you have flash mobs out here?”

Henry, who had very little idea what a flash mob even was, shrugged and pulled out a clean t-shirt and sweatpants from the drawers, jamming his baseball cap onto his head. Had Owen been doing his laundry again? How much time could any one person want to spend in a college laundromat?

Pella was still strangely riveted to whatever was happening out in the Small Quad. Henry felt that if he actually went over and looked he might lose his air of cool nonchalance, which he’d spent the last two and a half years trying and failing to learn from Owen. Instead he found himself thinking back to his first meeting with Pella’s father, who had been both impressed and amused by his surname, and then to a conversation he’d had many years before with his own grandfather…

More shrieks were filling the air. A proctor was going to tell them to keep it down any moment now. 

Pella drummed her fingers against the window frame between little herb planters. “If that’s the drama club, they’re getting way too high a subsidy out of my dad. We should probably call campus security. I think people are really getting hurt down there… Some football gang probably. Unless there’s some ancient prophecy that says when we have sex a bunch of zombies haul themselves out of Lake Michigan and start eating people.”

“Hmmm,” said Henry, in what he hoped was a “funny you should say that” sort of way.

She looked at him.

Henry tugged awkwardly on his t-shirt. “I mean, it’s probably nothing…”

“There are zombies in the quad. It is not nothing.”

“Well, I sort of remember this old story my grandpa used to tell me at Christmas… Something about the history of our family, how the Skrimshanders were an ancient people with dark secrets and we’d forgotten most of our magic, but in the right circumstances…”

“Which circumstances, precisely?”

Henry looked at his toes. “He said that when a Skrimshander mated with a whale, it would wake the dead.”

“A _whale_?”

“You know. Your, um, tattoo.”

She scratched at her shoulder. “Oh. Well, anyway, that’s ridiculous. That’s like saying my family has the ancient power of growing tulips just because my dad’s grandfather came over from Holland.”

Downstairs, doors slammed and there was the sound of wood being broken. There were footsteps on the stairs, coming fast.

“…but just for argument’s sake, if either zombies or drunk football fans bust in here, what’ve we got?”

Henry cast a look around. “Er.” Throwing books probably wouldn’t help. He opened up the closet. “Bleach?”

The door was flung open. Henry came about an inch from squirting cleaning fluid in Mike Schwartz’s eyes. 

“Thank fuck you’re okay,” Mike said. His game-day clothes were spattered in muck and gore, and the baseball bat he was carrying looked even worse. Owen, who came in behind him, was in much the same condition. “We just got back from the game… got off the bus and those freaks attacked us.”

“They’re not in the drama club, are they?” Pella asked dully.

“Certainly not,” Owen said. He dumped his team bag on his unmade bed, giving the rumpled comforter barely a glance. “Here, arm yourselves.” 

Henry stashed the bleach back in the closet and gratefully accepted a bat. Pella took one too, her expression far more doubtful.

“We appear to be in the standard zombie situation. They’re rotting corpses, essentially, so pretty easy to take apart and slow-moving, but there’s a lot of them.” Mike wiped some grime from his forehead. “Phones are all out. Best plan is to hole up somewhere until the cavalry arrives.”

Pella blinked. “There’s a _standard_ zombie situation? I mean, excuse my ignorance because I just got here, but does this happen a lot in Wisconsin?”

“It does on student union movie nights,” Henry said. 

“Much as I find the situation distressing, Michael does seem to have summed it up very well,” Owen commented. “Even if these are unfortunate plague victims rather than actual zombies, we still need to avoid their attacks.”

Henry glanced around. “So… we just stay here?” The four of them could probably live off his SuperBoost 9000 and Owen’s spirits collection for a while. “What about everyone else?”

“Fuck everyone else,” Pella said. “What about my dad?”

Owen’s head jerked up. “You haven’t seen him?”

“We can’t try to save this whole college by ourselves.” Mike was already glancing anxiously at the door. “Buddha and I barely made it here. There’s carnage downstairs.”

Pella sighed. “Okay, I guess I’m going by myself.”

“I’ll come with you,” Owen added.

“Er,” Henry said, in what he hoped was the most heroic way possible.

“Wait wait wait.” Mike’s bulk blocked the exit. “No one’s going anywhere. As far as we know, Affenlight’s totally fine, and the moment we go downstairs we’re going to be chomped into mincemeat by the walking dead. So can everyone just chill for a second?”

Pella glared at him. “He’s my dad. And if Henry’s anything like right about this ancient Skrimshander prophecy, he’s the only person around here who might know how to make the dead go right back to sleep in the lake.”

“Ancient Skrimmer prophecy?”

“I fucked Henry and we apparently caused the apocalypse. Can I go now?”

Mike stared. “You what?”

“Yeah yeah, and Owen’s fucking my dad and _there are zombies outside_. We can talk about all of this later.”

Mike turned to Owen, eyes wide.

“Zombies!” Owen said with enthusiasm. “And might I suggest we take an alternate route? As we’re already on the top floor, perhaps we should keep going up? Scull Hall is only across the alley.”

“Right, but it still must be a good ten, twelve feet…” Pella pushed past Mike, unhooking the narrow wall panel that led up to the roof. “There’s no way we’re going to safely make that.”

“Still better than what’s down there.”

Henry leaned over the railing, looking down several flights of stairs. It certainly did seem very red and splattery down there. When he turned back, Pella and Owen had already disappeared up onto the roof. He gave Mike a shove in the right direction. “I know, I know,” he muttered. “So I blew the game and screwed your girlfriend and woke the dead. There is honestly nothing you could say right now that could make it worse.”

Mike looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah… how about we keep moving?”

Henry had never been up on the roof of Phumber before, and the roof itself was hardly impressive, but there was a beautiful view of the campus, the chapel, the sun setting over the lake, and a horde of squelchy, decomposing zombies in the quad. He calmly reflected that nothing good ever came in hordes.

“It seems this is our best option,” Owen said. He and Pella had found a ladder to lay across the rooftops. It was certainly long enough, but it didn’t look like the hardy steel bridge with hardhats and safety ropes Henry had been hoping for. Then again, there were some interesting noises coming from the stairwell, which Mike was doing his best to barricade.

Pella took a step forward and looked over the edge. “It’s not actually that far across. We’ll be fine.”

“Or we’ll fall to our deaths or get eaten by monsters,” Mike summed up, joining them. “Skrim, you go first. You must be lightest.”

He could argue that Owen, although taller, had much less muscle… but something was banging on the stairwell door, and it was bending, bending… Henry wiped his brow, gripped his bat, and ran across, feet on the thicker outside struts of the ladder. It wobbled and so did he, but he hurled himself to the safety of the roof.

Owen came next, cool and collected even if the ladder squeaked alarmingly, and then Pella, accompanied by far more anxious swearing. As she set foot on solid ground, there was the crunch of breaking wood and Mike was no longer alone on the Phumber rooftop. He threw himself onto the ladder, away from the blood-drenched creature grasping for him, but lost his balance and was left dangling from its edge while the others watched.

Henry bit his lip, wanting to get out there and pull Mike up, but Mike was twice as big as him and any more weight on the ladder might break it. And never mind that, the zombie on the other side might jump on, or push the ladder off, and then Mike would be fodder for the hordes below.

This was like the best abstinence advertisement he’d ever seen.

“Mike, come on, you need to climb up!” Pella yelled.

Henry desperately wanted Owen to say something, to come up with a plan, and then the zombie seemed to grow a vast metal spear in its chest a second before completely splitting apart just as Mike managed to clamber up onto the ladder.

“What was that?” Henry asked.

“A harpoon, of course.” 

The voice came from behind them, and for a second Henry assumed it had to be another zombie… albeit a particularly well-spoken zombie with nicely turned-up shirt sleeves and distinguished silver-gray hair under a layer of blood and guts.

“Dad!” Pella flung herself at him as Mike jumped down onto the roof and pulled the ladder across. “Are you okay?”

President Affenlight smiled and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, it’s not my blood. Everyone all right? Henry? Owen?”

Henry nodded, but President Affenlight was all too clearly not looking at him. Pella sighed. “Oh, just hug him already. We all know.”

“Guert,” Owen said. “You seem to have a spear collection.”

Affenlight hefted another harpoon up off the ground. “Let’s just say that a high disposable income doesn’t go too well with easy access to eBay and a whaling obsession. Some of these are worth quite a bit… but given the present circumstances I thought they might be of some use. A little harder to throw than a football, unfortunately.”

“Dad,” Pella said. “We were hoping you might have another idea for getting rid of the zombie problem. Henry mentioned a prophecy.”

Henry stared at the rooftop and self-consciously scuffed the toe of his sneaker. 

“Yes…” Affenlight sighed. “Honestly, Pella. You couldn’t choose any other member of the baseball team?”

“Maybe if you’d _told_ me.”

“Absolutely. You have an excellent, well-documented record of doing precisely what I tell you to. If I’d told you not to screw Henry Skrimshander, we both know what would’ve happened.”

Pella glared. “Maybe if you’d mentioned the _zombies_. At least this explains why you were so pissed I got this tattoo.”

Mike cleared his throat. “Excuse me, President Affenlight…”

“Yes, Michael?”

“It seems as though most of the students living on campus have been slaughtered and we’re surrounded by zombies. I doubt it’ll take too long before they break into Scull Hall, and we don’t have very many harpoons. So if this is really about some prophecy, we’d really appreciate a way to reverse the spell.”

“As long as it means I don’t have to sleep with you,” Henry said. It was meant to be a joke, but everyone else on the rooftop was staring at him coldly under their layers of grime and gore. “Um. No offense.”

“No one has to sleep with anyone,” President Affenlight said heavily. “It’s quite simple, really. We need to blow up Herman Melville.”

“The statue?” Pella scratched her head. “That doesn’t sound very mystical.”

“Well, to be honest it’s not the statue itself, but what’s inside. The day I found those Melville papers in the library, I found something else, too. Something I didn’t understand at the time. Old, dark magic from the days the Skrimshanders were real whalers. But Professor Oxtin understood, and he had the papers encased in the statue so no one could ever summon the dead. He didn’t quite count on Henry attending the college, or sleeping with someone who had the correct tattoo.”

Owen frowned. “Guert, excuse me, but this all seems like a very unlikely circumstance.”

“Yes, as completely strange and bizarre as the college president sleeping with a baseball player,” Pella said. “Who _cares_ how unlikely it is? It’s happening. But how can we destroy the statue? It’s not like we have TNT stored in the bathroom.”

Her father poked the pointy end of his harpoon into the rooftop and failed to meet her eyes.

Pella clapped her hands together. “Okay, apparently we have TNT stored in the bathroom. I am never leaving you alone with a computer again.”

Half an hour later, with alarming creaks and crashes coming from inside Scull Hall below them, and with various zombies below trying their rotting hands at scaling the walls, Mike and President Affenlight had finished wiring up several rough globes of plastic explosive that had been stored in Scull Hall last summer by the Infrastructure Department.

“We just need to attach these to the statue, and we can detonate them from here,” President Affenlight explained.

Henry looked out to where the statue was. Not far, if there wasn’t a bloodthirsty swarm of inhuman creatures in the way. “Can we throw them?” he asked.

“I think that’s our only option,” the President agreed.

“Okay,” Mike said. “I guess I can do it, and Affenlight’s got a pretty good arm too…”

President Affenlight raised a finger. “It has to be Henry. He’s a Skrimshander.”

Mike threw up his hands. “It’s a statue! How does it know who threw the damn bomb?”

“Magic, blah blah, dark powers beyond our blah,” Pella explained. Owen nodded in agreement.

“Fine.” Mike looked toward Henry. “It’s no big deal, Skrimmer.”

Henry scratched his ear, pulled down on his cap. “Easy as a throw to first base?”

“Yeah… well, how about we think of it as second? Anyway, that statue’s a lot bigger than Rick.”

“Also,” Pella pointed out with a smile, “all our lives depend on it. So if you could just get over your issues for two minutes and save our skins, it would be much appreciated.”

Henry picked up the first ball. It felt tacky in his fingers. The weight was all off. But he could do it. His arm knew how to throw. His brain did too. It was just… He glanced at Owen, at the blue bruise still smearing his cheek.

Owen smiled. “We exhort you.”

Henry swallowed, drew in a breath, and threw.

The ball, despite all the thoughts of horror in his brain, slammed into Herman Melville’s shoulder with a dull _thunk_ and stuck there. Huh. One perfect throw, and all it had taken was the apocalypse.

He picked up the others and flung them in quick succession, taking the detonator that President Affenlight thrust into his hands. It was time to end this, once and for all.

The explosion was deafening and blew him back off his feet. When he came to, he was lying on the Scull Hall roof, coughing up concrete dust. “Did we win?” he asked, tongue thick in his mouth.

For at least an hour, the five of them sat up on the roof with the presidential scotch collection and watched what remained of the zombies haul themselves back down to the lake and disappear into its murky depths. The quad had been blown apart, littered with fragments of Melville. No living students or staff were anywhere to be seen.

“What are we going to do now?” Henry asked. He’d never really drunk scotch before, but now seemed like a good time to acquire a taste for it. 

“Wait for the authorities to arrive,” President Affenlight said. He had one arm around Owen, the other around Pella. “Hopefully it’s not as bad as it looks. A lot of people are off-campus at the weekend. We’ll have to clean up and move on. Finals might get put back by a few weeks, though.”

Mike considered the debris. “And how are we going to explain all of this? Ancient whale magic? Zombies?”

Owen took a gulp from what was probably a very expensive bottle. “Looks like the work of some renegade football fans to me. And maybe a gas leak?”

“The Infrastructure Department has some very shaky safety procedures,” President Affenlight agreed. “I’ve always said they were going to blow us sky high one of these days, and I’m sure the police will agree. Everything will be back to normal soon enough. We might even scrape together enough players for the Harpooners to go to Regionals. But Henry…”

“Yes, sir?”

“Never, _ever_ sleep with my daughter again.”

Henry nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Far, far away, toward the edge of Westish town, they could finally hear the sound of sirens.


End file.
